Adafruit Weekly Editorial Round-Up: June 25 – July 1, 2018
ADAFRUIT WEEKLY EDITORIAL ROUND-UP
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
When you start working with physical computing the first thing pretty much everybody does is to blink an LED on, and off, again. When things were harder, this was a rite of passage. Just to get to the stage where you could turn an LED on, and then off again, could take a week or more of hard work. The arrival of the Arduino changed all that, relegating it to a simple parlour trick, a “Hello World” of hardware.
These days things are different, and while we’re reaching the end of Moore’s Law, we haven’t quite got there yet. Over the last few years we’ve seen a bewildering explosion in the number of microcontroller and single board computers. People have experimented with form factors and processors, and pretty much every board now comes with radios, sometimes lots of radios.
Build your own Minerva Owl Bot, powered by Crickit! Program her in CircuitPython to talk, look around, and flap her wings!
It doesn’t take exotic materials to build your own audio-animatronic, just a few paper cups, craft supplies, a couple of servos, and a Circuit Playground Express with Crickit, battery pack, and a speaker!
Browse all that’s new in the Adafruit Learning System here!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.